So we paddled back to Oxford, talking all the way of indifferent subjects, of England and our English villages, and enjoying the peaceful greenness of the trees and banks. It was half-past six when we got to Salter's barge, and I walked with Ida as far as the Randolph. Then I returned to college, feeling very much like an undetected sheep-stealer, and had a furtive sort of dinner served up in my own room. Next morning, I confess it was with a sigh of relief that Annie and I saw Ida Van Rensselaer start from the station _en route_ for Liverpool. It was quite a fortnight before I could face my own bulldogs unabashed, and I bowed with a wan and guilty smile upon my face whenever any one of those twelve undergraduates capped me in the High till the end of term. I believe they never missed an opportunity of meeting me if they saw a chance open. I was glad indeed when long vacation came to ease me of my office and my troubles. II. Congress Hall in Saratoga is really one of the most comfortable hotels at which I ever stopped. Of course it holds a thousand guests, and covers an unknown extent of area: it measures its passages by the mile and its carpets by the acre. All that goes unsaid, for it is a big American hotel; but it is also a very pleasant and luxurious one, even for America. I was not sorry, on the second of July, to find myself comfortably quartered (by elevator) in room No. 547 on the fifth floor, with a gay look-out on Broadway and the Columbia Spring. After ten days of dismal rolling on the mid-Atlantic, and a week of hurry and bustle in New York, I found it extremely delightful to sit down at my ease in summer quarters, on a broad balcony overlooking the leafy promenade, to sip my iced cobbler like a prince, and to watch that strange, new, and wonderfully holiday life which was unfolding itself before my eyes. Such a phantasmagoria of brightly-dressed women in light but costly silks, of lounging young men in tweed suits and panama hats, of sulkies, carriages, trotting horses, string bands, ice-creams, effervescing drinks, cool fruits, green trees, waving bunting, lilac blossoms, roses, and golden sunshine I had never seen till then, and shall never see again, I doubt me, until I can pay a second visit to Saratoga. It was a midsummer saturnalia of strawberries and acacia flowers, gone mad with excessive mint julep.